


First Seal

by sapling



Category: South Park
Genre: Also It's The 90s, F/F, I Cannot Believe It's Femslash, South Park Occult AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 07:24:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16445402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapling/pseuds/sapling
Summary: Set in her ways from birth like the rest of the town yet equally, readily accepting of the impossible; Henrietta Biggle was her universal constant, a reminder that she was a hundred percent sound of mind.





	First Seal

**Author's Note:**

> hi this is in connection to my south park occult au. i plan on writing a series of drabbles which will bump the rating on this but for now the summary stays the same. i love women.

_**13 November 1993 A.D**_  
_9:08PM_

“So…” Henrietta closed the door behind her as the other girl took off her scarf, free at last from the winter chill, “How’s Stan?”

Kenny choked almost immediately, “Stan? How’s  _Stan?_ ”

The back room of the tattoo parlor was only accessible from a private entrance on the outside, creating a false sense of separation from Henrietta’s work. A couple of months was all she intended on, but nearly two years after being handed the keys to the shop, and some of Kenny’s handiwork, the living arrangement became bearable at best.

Henrietta made a point of rolling her eyes as hard as she could while Kenny’s laughter grew exponentially, “Fuck, forget I even asked—”

“Finally!  _Finally_  we’re learning how to give a shit about other people! Way-to- _go_ , Henry!” she exclaimed, giving her a resounding  _whap_  on the back that earned her another glare, “We’re kinda low ballin’ it here because we’re asking about Stan, though. Between you and me, poor dude’s  _never_  okay—”

Her home reflected Henrietta’s tastes, decorated with trinkets from garage sales hosted several towns over and from shady nobodies off the web. For the longest time Kenny believed that Henrietta came across everything in an estate sale; in her locker there was a photo of the old Victorian-style house she cleared out, proudly claiming it belonged to descendants of Mary Shelley herself. She only recently came clean after Kenny reassured her that no matter  _how_  she got a hold of the belongings of a bubonic plague victim or cursed artifacts from a reservation down south in Arkansas—it was still fucking creepy. A seal of utmost approval and honor.

Aside from the more eccentric talkpieces, the walls were plastered with old band posters from concerts they snuck into back in Denver, mementos that replaced the yearbook she refused to buy. The rest of the back wall was occupied by two bookshelves with volumes packed as tightly as possible, and the bookshelves bordered an altar the original Goths crafted themselves with walnut spray paint, plywood and a lifetime’s worth of superglue. It was relocated after high school graduation from Henrietta’s bedroom of which Kenny still entered through the back window up until junior year.

Today, the altar wasn’t in use.

“It’s not just about Stan, he still liveswith you doesn’t he?” Henrietta grabbed a book of matches from inside her nightstand, striking it against paper and allowing the matchstick to burn before waving it out. 

“More like  _I’m_  shackin’ it up with  _him_ , since.” Kenny plopped her belongings onto the floor beside the entrance to the back of the parlor, “Y’know, it’s his apartment.”

“Kenny.” Henrietta gritted her teeth, forcing attention to the matter at hand, “Is he still throwing up weird shit or not, because if he  _is_ , and he’s  _contagious_ , and you’re around  _me_  and my  _clients?!_  I will rip you a new one.”

She watched as Henrietta placed her hands on her hips indignantly, awaiting an answer while Kenny got the last of her snickers out. It wasn’t like she was  _uncaring,_  it was only her care was limited to a very select number of people, a number that hadn’t fluxed in any giant varying degree from the time they knew each other.  Poking fun at the, minuscule as it may be, concern she still held for the younger Marsh sibling was one of her favorite pasttimes where the opportunity came once in a blue moon.

A couple more laughs shook her before Kenny finally bit her lip and nodded her head, “Oh yeah. Mad sick, dude. He might’a actually gotten worse since you last saw him. Don’t think he’s contagious though.”

Henrietta frowned slightly, but relinquished judgement, “And what makes you say that?”

She took pause as coughing it up to instinct never really settled the tattoo artist down. Weird, and contradictory as it might be, Henrietta was a fan of tangible proof, “Take a fucking chill pill; you’re not catchin’ any damn cooties from me or anything.”

That seemed to suffice.

“Anyways uh…you said you still got that book?” Kenny changed the subject, turning her gaze to the candles arranged on the floor, half-lit and staged within a circle with sigils precisely etched in chalk, “From when we were kids?”

“It’s an original copy,  _of course_ ,” she answered, “Doubt they’re even printing the OG shit anymore.” Henrietta’s dedication to the craft wasn’t something foreign to her. In fact, it was the main thing that drew Kenny inside her inner group in the first place. On one hand she went about her business in order to keep the tattoo parlor afloat in the most blasé fashion, in the other she put hours upon hours of time she never gave to anyone else towards further understanding the inner workings of an ancient code. There was this fine line she walked between textbook religion and ideology paired with the science of nature draped in black, garnished in ink, and a supernatural concept that encompassed the true meaning of free will.

She was ahead of the curve in Kenny’s opinion. Set in her ways from birth like the rest of the town yet equally, readily accepting of the impossible; Henrietta Biggle was her universal constant, a reminder that she was a hundred percent sound of mind.

“The ‘dying’ part of your curse isn’t going away anytime soon’s far as I can tell,” Henrietta knelt to light a candle in the circle, then backed away from her masterpiece to make certain everything was arranged fit to her liking, “So I kept it in case.”

Kenny scoffed, folding her arms “In case,  _what_? More words show up?”

“ _Christ_ , Ken. I meant in case we missed something,” Henrietta paused in regret as the words left her mouth, only relaxing when she saw Kenny had immediately dismissed her thought entirely rather than continued to protest. Henrietta was careful to not insinuate she had a better idea of how ‘it’ worked than Kenny did; she never would, and she repeatedly expressed how she’d never want the pleasure of knowing. While she wasn’t forthcoming in what caused her discomfort, she hung around Kenny enough to tell the subtleties of change in her body language whenever the subject was eluded to in any context.  Henrietta’s investment in unveiling what  _could_  be done to make life more bearable for her old classmate didn’t come without immediate skepticism. After a while, Henrietta got Kenny to bend to something she already gave up on, “Look, we don’t have to go through with this if you don’t want to—"

She tensed as she bit the urge to bail, anchoring her feet to the floorboards, “Don’t pull that shit with me—I already told you I didn’t wanna do this.”

The issue at hand was minor, at least that’s the narrative the girl spun for nearly a decade in order to keep Henrietta’s concerns at bay, to keep herself from dwelling on it to the point her chest ached. Their relationship cycled around a series of reminders that Henrietta ticked off in a journal for the sake of muscle-memory as her notes of Kenny’s repeated deaths would only disappear from the mortal plane the day she returned. The act was superficial at best as no matter how detailed her accounts were, Henrietta immediately forgot she wrote them in the first place the moment her heart stopped beating.

A few months prior, she proposed an experiment which was rejected almost as many times the universe chewed her up and spat her out.

I’m only doin’ this for you,” Kenny shoved her hand into the pockets of her worn jeans, fishing out a prescription bottle and tossing it into Henrietta’s hands, “So let’s just get it over with before I change my mind.”

Henrietta only used black candles in her rituals; she explained once that black candles simply looked better and didn’t carry much significance despite their sinister reputation. The presence of white ones instead atop the sigils told Kenny this wasn’t an ordinary session, how serious she was in her bid to remove the metaphorical blinders from her eyes once and for all—the white would signify clarity.

“ _Gag me with a spoon_ , this is entirely—” Henrietta eyed the orange prescription bottle filled with a substance, tipping it to one side, “…this better be spit.”

Kenny found a spot to sit on the floor on the outside of the circle and gave her a shit eating smirk, “And what if it isn’t?”

Granted, she’d only been involved in a handful with the other goth kids back in high school, all of whom treated her very existence as an affliction rather than something to envy. The way Kenny explained the rules, her detailed accounts of Hellfire, they had no choice but to believe her and thus included her claiming ‘ _the dark energy which binds you will empower us all and strengthen our devotion’_ …or something to that nature. Henrietta’s mouth fell agape in disgust, “I told you something that came from your body, and you—if this is—!”

“I didn’t actually jack off into a prescription pill bottle, carry it with me in my pocket for several hours, and give it to you,” Kenny peeled off her jacket and slid it beneath her. The floor was old and worn, uncomfortable as shit and in desperate need of repair, “ _So_  sorry to disappoint.”

With her free hand Henrietta pinched the bridge of her nose, tapping it with a carefully manicured forefinger before sighing, “No one’sever killed you before, huh? Ever?”

“Nah, not yet...well, not on purpose,” Kenny didn’t make fun as Henrietta coughed up a laugh, joining her on the floor on the outside of the circle cross-legged. It wasn’t loud and boisterous like hers, and it took some time of convincing for her to stop instinctively covering it up with her hands adorned with black fishnets. Or straight up lying that she showed any other emotion than apathy, or that one time she told Kenny to quit making her laugh as it cramped her style, “But... is that an invitation, babe?”

Henrietta popped open the prescription bottle and picked up the small red dish sitting along the perimeter, tapping its contents into it. She sat it back down, and in one swift motion she clapped the lights out allowing the dark of the night to seep into the living space. Her theatrics were on par with Kenny’s—necessary, pointed with a flare that rivaled her old antics from when the two were younger. She adored it with every inch of her being.

“It is not an invitation,” Henrietta replied coolly as she lit the final candle, “…but say the word and I’ll change that.” 


End file.
